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I might be a bit late to the party with this one but as the old saying goes, ‘better late than…’ whatever. This is my contribution to Sue’s challenge over at A Word In Your Ear.

Each week she picks a word from the dictionary to challenge us and this week the word is ‘metallic’. So I dug up some photos of some beautiful metal sculptures that I stumbled upon in the Dunedin Botanical Gardens, New Zealand.

The sculptures were life size, incredibly detailed depictions of Peter Pan. They looked completely at home amongst the incredible flowers and manicured lawns of the Botanic Gardens. Tinkerbell whispering endless secrets to Peter Pan. The Lost Boys were curled up amongst the roots of the tree stump Peter Pan stood upon. The sculpture was decorated with all sorts of beautiful woodland creatures, such as this little guy. He was no bigger than a matchbox. To one side of Peter was this gorgeous sculpture of Wendy, Michael and John Darling, flying off to Neverland. I thought this plaque was the perfect surreal touch to the entire masterpiece.

This word is beginning to sound as foreign to me as Latin. I haven’t had a vacation, a proper one, for well over a year. For someone who used to travel overseas or across country at the drop of a hat, it is becoming slightly depressing.

But this is a time to work hard, I know, and so I vacation vicariously through my old photographs. And now The Daily Post has given me the perfect prompt to share some of them, so here are some of my past Vacations.

I get lost in many ways. I get lost reading, writing, gardening, running, listening to music, looking through blogs…

But one of my favourite ways to get lost is taking photographs. Most of my family cannot understand, or stand, for that matter, my habit of taking endless photos. They don’t understand why you would photograph the same sunset forty times, always searching for that shot you haven’t quite captured yet. They get embarrassed going places with me, when I am down on one knee or walking backwards and forth in front of a subject, searching for the elusive angle.

It sometimes causes quite an annoyance, like on the day I took these pictures. I told my boyfriend that I was going for a short walk around Lake Wanaka to take some photos, and I would be back soon. Three hours later, and we had missed our dinner reservations.

I took roughly 250 photos walking around the lake, of all sorts of bits and pieces. I wandered around in my own little dream world, so happy to be in a place of such beauty with a camera in my hand. I had no idea how long I was away for, I was completely lost in the moment.

This week’s challenge from Sue over at A Word In Your Ear is fantastic. It had me searching through endless folders for photographs that best met the theme of ‘angles’. The beauty of this challenge is that angles can be found in nearly every photograph, if you look hard enough. Obviously, I got carried away.

Another day, another Daily Post Challenge. This one is awesome. It asks us to show photo’s with ourselves or others as the lesser part of the scene, a shadow or a reflection, essentially making the background the focus. I loved looking through my photos for examples of this, often pictures that have our shadow or reflection (accidently or on purpose) are cast aside as imperfect.

This photo was taken at Hunter’s Estate winery in New Zealand. It is a collection of antique wine tools, displayed in a glass cabinet. I became frustrated trying to get a good shot without my reflection, in this one you can see me, and my camera strap, quite clearly. In this photo taken at Cloudy Bay winery, I was deliberately aiming to include our reflections. I thought it made an interesting image, seeing the back of the winery but also seeing us enjoying our wine tasting.

I took this photograph during a shift in a restaurant I used to work in. (I may have been slacking off somewhat) It is stacks of upturned silver wine buckets, ready for service. You can see my reflection, and my awesome uniform, in the bucket on the left of frame.

This is the silhouettes of my sister and I in Koh Chang, Thailand. We are not the focus but rather a piece of the background, fitting into the jigsaw puzzle of silhouettes against the sunset. I took these photographs in the Toul Sleng genocide museum, Cambodia. You can faintly make out my reflection in the glass. The reflection of myself and the background make a chilling juxtaposition to the endless sadness and horror portrayed in these images. On the boardwalk in Melaka, Malaysia, again nothing but a silhouette against the colours of the background and the sunset.

This is one of my favourite photographs that I have ever taken. I took this on a timer on my little point and shoot Olympus, five years ago in Kep, Cambodia. I perched the camera on a wall across the road, set the timer and sprinted to the edge of the footpath to get the shot. I kept having to adjust the zoom and the position, constantly terrified that someone would walk past and grab my camera while my back was turned. But the end result was worth it.

The challenge over at The Daily Post is green themed, which I thought I would have another attempt at, simply because I found too many green photos. This is more of a nature themed post, for what is nature if not a smorgasbord of green.